Possibly related:

screen shot of memory usage by app, showing Firefox using over 18GB of RAM

I also don’t understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.

  • Fenderfreek@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    “Cache” means space used for disk caching. It’s free to be used for processes as needed, but the system consumes idle RAM until then to speed things up, so it’s technically not “free”, even though it isn’t used by system processes. In Linux, used - cache gives you the actual consumption by processes.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOP
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      1 day ago

      Thanks, someone else also mentioned this. Cached is considered used in Linux, where as in Windows it’s considered free since applications can use it if they need it even though it holds data.